Like many others who have grown increasingly adverse to the emasculatedmainstream press, I hardly buy The Star. So huge thanks to Nat, whose recent posting alerted me to a highly xenophobic piece penned by Wong Chun Wai, the group chief editor of the best selling English daily in Malaysia.

Last week, a Myanmar worker succumbed to leptospirosis at a Penang hospital. Given the current climate of fear over Influenza A (H1N1), Wong perhaps felt compelled to write that ‘migrants workers are bringing in infectious diseases', and that ‘it would not be wrong to say that Malaysia is facing the emergence and re-emergence of diseases because of these foreigners'.

In what must have looked like an ominous coincidence, Lim Sue Goan, a senior columnist at Sin Chew Daily, wrote on the same day that ‘I would sometimes hold my breath when a migrant worker passes me by' simply because they might ‘bring in a disease that has long been extinct'.

Throughout human history, weak minorities in anywhere of the world have been subjected to prejudice and unjustified scrutiny, even made to bear the brunt whenever a pandemic takes place. Discrimination seems like an age-old habit that is hard to kick.